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every airline loses luggage and has rules on how much they will reimburse you

yes it sucks, but it happens to every airline every day. this is like the idiots who switch wireless carriers every week because of some perceived slight in customer service or they can't get 10 bars at home 24x7

Yes, but some airlines/airports lose luggage more often than others. And some airlines are more helpful than others when they do lose the luggage.

And some customers are real douchebags who take affront at everything and are unreasonable no matter how hard the agent is trying to help.

Bottom line is - we don't know where the line is in this case. This guy may have a completely legitimate grievance, or he could be raising hell because BA wouldn't compensate him $500 a bag or give him 10,000 free travel miles. We just don't know.

The tweet shown with TFA simply says "Don't fly with British Airways. Their customer service is horrendous".

Not only is this entirely plausible, on the basis of anecdotal evidence, but any attempt to sue him for libel for such an innocuous comment would be doomed to ignominious failure.

He is perfectly at liberty to express his dissatisfaction with their service. If BA doesn't like it, they can always try pulling up their game.

And for what it's worth, a shitlist is as just as useful as a recommendation. As every corporation knows, a satisfied customer might tell a couple of people, but a dissatisfied customer will tell at least ten.

I used to maintain a shitlist (LG electronics goods are at the top), but now I check reviews before I buy. I'll sometimes accept one negative review in 10 as an outlier, but 3 or more is usually enough of a flag to tell me to look elsewhere.

Yes, but some airlines/airports lose luggage more often than others. And some airlines are more helpful than others when they do lose the luggage.

And some customers are real douchebags who take affront at everything and are unreasonable no matter how hard the agent is trying to help.

Bottom line is - we don't know where the line is in this case. This guy may have a completely legitimate grievance, or he could be raising hell because BA wouldn't compensate him $500 a bag or give him 10,000 free travel miles. We just don't know.

I RTFA'd.

The tweet said "dont fly @BritishAirways their customer service is horrendous" which is a valid opinion and very neutrally worded (and given my personal experiences with BA, entirely true, I swear they're run by angry Scottish grandmothers). Hard to tell what his grievance is here. This is a pretty big non-event. Guy buys tweet, guy posts generic message, goes viral. I guess it's a slow news day.

But I completely agree with your point, some people are utter tosspots when dealing with airlines

Traveling from New York to Hungary, I have had baggage delayed twice. American Airlines had a special car drive the bags 2 hours to my location the next day, and gave a $100 reimbursement for emergency replacement of items for that missing day.

British Airways is another story. The bags hadn't arrived in Vienna when we arrived. The whereabouts were unknown, but the next day they showed up at the airport. We couldn't communicate with the airport baggage handlers directly to give them our address; we needed to fill out a form with BA and they would telex -- TELEX -- the information to the airport. Then, we would need to wait for a phone call between working hours to give them directions how to reach our address. Every day, when the phone call never arrived, we would call BA back, and discover that the information was garbled--that an address in Hungary isn't a local phone number, that it needs an international country code, that we are not at our origin since we left it via airplane so there is no point in calling it. After 3 days, the information was allegedly straightened out. From that point, there was no longer a reason for them not to call us. Since there was still no way to contact the airport, we had no choice but to call BA every few hours and plead with them to get the airport to call us. All they did was tell us they sent these pleas via telex, and it was a one-way communication so there was no way to receive a direct response. They could not or would not give us a phone number directly to the people they were sending the telexes to. We sent messages to BA customer service headquarters, since the BA staff in Vienna were not helping. Their customer service never responded, not even with an automated message.

After a week of no clothing, our own deodorant, or toothbrushes, we looked up the address of the airport on the web and tracked down a working phone number for the baggage handlers. They delivered the bag the next day, though with reluctance over the distance and the country border. We never did hear from BA customer service, and we never got a cent for the inconvenience, because we needed receipts for our items in order to get any money.

Just fuck them. I understand that the company was at the mercy of Austria's sadistic concept of customer service, but the organization should still be held responsible for those it hires or contracts. For contrast, I once complained to AA when the TV in my seat wasn't working on an international flight, and I got a $100 voucher (which I never used). No airline is perfect, but there is an expectation on customer service in fixing problems that is lacking with BA.

Most likely it's not the airline that handles your luggage but a local (unionized) airport service. They're typically manned by ex-cons and others that for some reason can't get anything else at minimum wage. Then there are their friends over at DHS that screen the luggage with very sticky fingers. Try leaving jewelry in your luggage, you've got pretty much 50% chance that it will disappear. My friend used to work at DHL, those people would simply come pick up TV's from the DHL loading area and drive away, they gave the guards their cut, usually a bottle of something and it would simply remain unpunished.

That doesn't mean that some companies aren't so egregiously bad at customer service that you wouldn't walk away from doing business with them.

In my experience, United Airlines is shit, don't care if they're shit, will tell you point blank you shouldn't expect anything but shit, and would you like some more shit?

When a company ignores you, blows you off, or does absolutely nothing about your complaints, I think something like this is brilliant.

Sending a very public "fuck you" is sometimes the only recourse you have for companies who have lousy service. If they're going to act like "too bad, we don't care" -- pointing that out for all to see isn't such a bad idea.

I've never dealt with BA, but I've certainly encountered companies whose customer service is so terrible as to make you think they're doing it on purpose. And those companies deserve a little public shaming sometimes.

In the early 2000s I had a two Sprint phones on a family plan. For a year, I checked our usage almost daily on their website. One day, it stopped working. The first-line idiot said that it still worked the same way it did when he was hired 6 months ago. I asked him whether he thought I was crazy and he said, "Well, I guess I don't know." I spoke to his manager - same line: you have never been able to do this from our website. Either guy could have at least pretended to believe me, but that's customer service gone right and they were all about getting it wrong. How hard could a bug report be? I cancelled my service on the spot.

Had I been able to buy a Tweet at the time, I might have. Complete incompetence.

Strange. Because that's the attitude I associate with Delta and especially American, and I have had great service from United and have flown them dozens of times. And in the couple instances where I had problems, they were able to come through and go above and beyond.

There was a time when loyalty was rewarded on United. But those days are long gone. Yes, I get permanent gold status, and free checked bags, but every other attribute, I am treated as much as shitty as the holiday cheap fare fliers, even when I pay full coach fares. Fuck UAL with a chainsaw.

That doesn't mean that some companies aren't so egregiously bad at customer service that you wouldn't walk away from doing business with them.

Exactly. The one thing you can always do is vote with your money.

When the german Bahn AG (train company) was stupid to me about a 40ÂâÂdispute, I told them that in my business position I control a couple thousand Euros in travel budget going their way - or not. They blew me off, I told my secretary to always check alternatives and book them if they're the same or slightly more expensive from now on.

When O2 was stupid to me about my (rather small) mobile contract, I told them they could be nice to me or I'd cancel my much larger phone and DSL contracts as well. They didn't listen, so I move all my business elsewhere. When I got the usualy retention call, I told them why.

It is unlikely that your move will get as much attention and most likely it'll all get lost at the customer service level. I used #o2sucks on plenty of my FB postings while the above crap was going down, but I don't think it got very much attention.

But someone has to start. And if you move your business away from the crap companies, they won't even notice. But if a thousand people like you do it, they'll start to notice. And if ten or a hundred thousand do it, they just might smarten up. And if they don't, they might go belly up and good riddance. But someone has to start, so be that someone.

But someone has to start. And if you move your business away from the crap companies, they won't even notice. But if a thousand people like you do it, they'll start to notice. And if ten or a hundred thousand do it, they just might smarten up. And if they don't, they might go belly up and good riddance. But someone has to start, so be that someone.

Brought Arlo Guthrie to mind:

You know, if one person, just one person does it, they may think he's really sick and they won't take him.
And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them.
And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singing a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out.
They may think it's an organization.
And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in, singi

"every airline loses luggage and has rules on how much they will reimburse you"

Incidentally, while airline staff will, at times, attempt to lowball you, they can sometimes be...encouraged... to be more helpful by the implication(ideally true) that you are familiar with the 'The Warsaw convention (as amended by the Hague and Montreal protocols)' if your dispute involves luggage, 'Regulation 261/2004' if your dispute involves flight delays, being bumped, etc. and falls under EU jurisdiction. Trying the sam

The way Lufthansa handled my wife's lost luggage during her recent trip to Europe was absolutely pitiful. The staff were utterly horrible, and despite promises that she would be reimbursed for everything she had to replace during the 11 days the luggage was missing (on a 15 day trip), we are still waiting for reimbursement 2 months later, having even taken everything to the nearest Lufthansa office in another state for verification. Their call centre staff are ridiculously rude - I will grant that their Eng

there are pretty clear standards for libeleven if you can't afford a lawyer, its not that hard to prepare for an initial hearing and ask for summary judgement for it to be dismissed. of course that would mean that you tried to go through BA to find your luggage and they failed and didn't compensate you and whatever.

It is well known, though, that Britain is a Very Bad place to be sued for libel. My guess would be that BA isn't going to push it, because they'd rather just have the thing blow over; but British libel law is brutal. (Incidentally, American feelings on 'libel tourism', the practice of suing people in the most favorable venue, were so strong that the "SPEECH Act [wikipedia.org]", which makes all foreign libel judgements unenforceable by US courts unless compliant with 1st amendment standards, passed unanimously in both the

English defamation law puts the burden of proving the truth of allegedly defamatory statements on the defendant, rather than the plaintiff, and has been considered an impediment to free speech in much of the developed world.

I'm sure the law is more complicated than that (and Wikipedia isn't the greatest source in the world) but it could get hairy for the guy.

Since it's a civil action it's based on a balance of probabilities rather than the criminal standard of beyond reasonable doubt. Having the defendant carry the burden of proof seems reasonable to me - if I claim you do something that might damage your reputation in private I should have some proof of that. How could you be expected to prove a negative?

Au contraire...I've found that I get great service on Slashdot for legal questions. You can ask anything and get lots of different answers in minutes. None of these people are actual lawyers but that doesn't stop them from expounding at length (as if they were getting paid by the hour) about any subject. The usual barriers of accounting for different laws in different jurisdictions are never a problem here. You can get legal advice for any country just by extrapolating answers from the five or ten countries represented in the typical answer set.Best of all, it's free and open source!

His tweet said "their customer service is horrendous." That clearly makes it a matter of opinion, which is protected by free speech laws in the US. However, British laws are much more "protective" of the "victims" of "big meanies" who share their opinions in public.

But that's the thing. They were taking special care, deliberately abusing what were obviously fragile musical instruments.

If your guitar, packed in a non-ATA case, gets crushed because turbulence causes some other package to land on it in flight, that's the traveler's problem. If it's broken because an airline employee deliberately throws it to the ground 10 feet below instead of putting it on the conveyor like the other luggage, that's the airline's problem - regardless of what the contract says.

what happened years ago doesn't count since airlines are losing money now and looking for ways to cut costs. years ago we had somewhat real food on planes. even on short 3 hour flights. years ago i've flown on planes half full and had a whole row of seats to myself. years ago you could get to the airport 30 minute prior to your flight and make it easily

i haven't flown them for years, but how do they suck? you pay money, you get on plane. you pay to take luggage with you.sometimes weather happens along with other things and planes get delayed. sometimes luggage is lost. that's why anything expensive you always carry on yourself and never check it in.

and i've always hated the people that bring the huge bags on aircraft taking up all the space. i have no problem with airlines making them check it in

I have been on flights that were overbooked, planes that were broken only to be discovered after we boarded and delays extending past 12 hours. To be extra jerks they of course just made the delay one or two hours at a time so they could avoid compensating us for food or toiletries. Shit happens, but how they handle it is beyond poor customer service.

People bring those bags aboard because airlines seem to love to lose or break stuff. If Fedex can manage 99%+ delivery to the right place at the right time surely the airlines could too.

same hereplanes are complex machines, they break. one time i saw an engine leak oil from my seat. the point is don't expect them to spend $100 for a hotel or whatever if you spent $200 on a flight. that's air travel.

I have different expectations. When I spend $800 on a flight round trip I do expect a $100 hotel if they fuck up. Not my problem. Air travel is like that because we allow it. Honestly I think that they should start having to refund a percentage of the ticket cost for every half hour they are late, if the problem is within their control like a broken plane.

Presumably you are talking about your experience in the US, because that kind of shit would never be allowed in the EU. You have a right to food, accommodation and compensation. I don't know why US consumers put up with being treated that way.

Dont do Business with United Airlines. I used to answer phones for a travel website (that I wont mention, but they're still around.) and recieved a call from a grieving, crying father who was so upset he could barely talk for the first 10 minutes.

This was in 2002, with 9/11 fresh on everyone's minds still. The guys son was on a flight from one end of the country to another, where to where I dont recall anymore but it doesn't matter. He had a heavy middle-eastern accent, an

that's why anything expensive you always carry on yourself and never check it in.

Sometimes you will not be allowed to take the expensive stuff as carry on. e.g. camera equipment. That goes easily in the thousands of dollars very fast.

What I heard a person do is take a flare gun (unloaded) and put it in the case and then fill out the forms that there is a firearm in the case and you can bet your sweet ass, they are doing almost everything to not loose your case with the firearm.http://traveltips.usatoday.com [usatoday.com]

Think about this, BA did not respond to this paid & highly public tweet until 4 hours later. If they are that bad at dealing with publicity, I imagine their customer service on a daily (semi-private) basis must be 10 times worse.

I assume for something so odd and unexpected it took them a bit to properly prepare their response.

Marketing guy would have to take it to his Mgmt and him to his, etc... then it'd have to debate on how to respond then it' have to be passed back down the chain and done. Last thing you want is for it to go south and you be THAT GUY that messed it up. Name of the game is covering your ass, especially on high publicized portional PR nightmares.

I work for a company that has "social media" outlets... and at one point I was put in charge of it. Let's be clear, social media fucking sucks. You can have a Facebook page, you can tweet, you can post every 20min and no-one will pay any attention unless you have some kind of contest, at which point every script kiddy in the country is going to write a bot and undermine the event.

When it comes to responding to messages its not quite as bad, but really what can you do? In most cases people post something at

For the same reason they have people answering the phones. Having the conversation in public is much better for everyone who is not the big company.

Lost luggage happens, some airlines do a better job finding it or compensating. The fact that the person who lost it was not a direct employee of BA does not matter. BA was handed the bags and is responsible for them until they are handed back to their owner.

But I wouldn't expect them to keep this power. Just like retail stores rid themselves of picketers by building shopping malls (you can't picket on private property, so pickets can only be at the street entrance to the mall property which severely hampers their effect on individual stores). No doubt they'll figure some way to take the wind out of these sails. Freedom of speech only belongs to those with money...

The thing is though it's really no different from regular malls. The picketers have to stay off private property which means the they need to be pretty far away from the store if it has a good sized parking lot.

It really has nothing to do with whether or not the store is in a mall, and everything about how much parking there is between the store and the street.

Stores have been known to be picketed, but you don't see it much anymore. Picketing a store with it's own parking lot is a lot more effective though, than picketing a store with a huge shared parking lot-- I've seen it happen, people picketing at an entrance to a mall parking lot, but there are usually many entrances, and it's tough to cover them all with a small crew, and the problem being, a mall may have hundreds of stores, you don't know who's crossing the picket line and who's not. Customers may just

We have unions out protesting in front of various businesses because they used non-union labor for things. Of course I don't think they have actual union people out protesting. They probably hire out non-union people for that...

Unions are not the only picketers. Sure it was common for unions to picket, but private citizens or individual employees have been known to as well. Not much point though if you are one person with an issue at one store, even an independent one, that's in a space in a 250-store mall with a huge paking lot.

They might lose luggage more if it results in others paying to promote their brand name! Folks down the road won't remember why BA is in the forefront of their subconscious when they go to purchase tickets... Smart of Jet Blue to try to get in on the attention too.

This is one of the big problems with trying to warn folks off bad service, you really need to promote every company save the one you aren't a fan of or it just ends up good for them in the long run.

They might lose luggage more if it results in others paying to promote their brand name! Folks down the road won't remember why BA is in the forefront of their subconscious when they go to purchase tickets... Smart of Jet Blue to try to get in on the attention too.

This is one of the big problems with trying to warn folks off bad service, you really need to promote every company save the one you aren't a fan of or it just ends up good for them in the long run.

All PR is good PR is only something said when there's bad press by people who want to keep their jobs. And it isn't true. If it were everyone on/. would love Microsoft.

"They might lose luggage more if it results in others paying to promote their brand name! "

Just send your luggage with UPS or Federal Express to the Hotel and back if you must use an extra one besides the one you carry. I use a sturdy metal one (I don't have to carry it, so...)The first time I saw that it was some Boy scouts who sent all their gear that way because they'd had been bitten several times.

I'm sure they lose them too sometimes, but they have better insurance and they bring it home and you don't

Ryanair is fine if you don't bring any luggage beyond your purse/carry-on. Though I wouldn't expect a 5-star inflight meal.

I know people who travel with no luggage at all... just go to a consignment on arrival to buy some outfits, and donate to a charity before leaving. Works remarkably well for them, and not actually much more expensive than paying overage fees. Also, if they're flying domestically, they get a tax writeoff for the donation (though that bit works better in big countries like Canada or the U

I would never fly Ryanair, because my understanding is that if there's ever any problem, even if it's entirely their fault, their first and only reaction is going to be flipping you the bird, and I don't want to rist that.

However, while flying Southwest, even though it offers you a whopping 2 free checked bags, I very rarely take advantage of it, because it's just so much *simpler* packing everything into a backpack and stowing it under your seat. You're never worried that your things will get lost, redirec

are there airlines that charge you for even a single under-the-seat bag?

Probably some of the super-ultra-mega discount ones, but I have never flown such an airline. (cheapest/lowest end I've ever personally flown was Air Canada/Jazz... for trips to Europe, I usually take Air France or British Airways depending on where I'm flying to/from, though I've flown Lufthansa, too. My aunt is the one who regularly took Ryanair when she was in Europe).

Having a change of clothes stuffed in your laptop bag or a backpack isn't a bad idea... the point was mostly about not bringing a suitcase.

And my point is, I stuff my laptop in my backpack, and then stuff *all* my clothes in there with it, and that's all my luggage, unless I'm gonna be gone more than like a week, and I'm going somewhere where there won't be any way to wash clothes.

The thing to understand about Ryanair is that it's less an airline and more of a bus with wings. They don't care about you in the same way that the bus service in your city doesn't care about you. They'd like to cram as many people on as can pay the fare, get you to your destination on-time-ish and hustle you off.

It's not a bad system, but luggage and stuff works exactly as badly as it usually does on the bus. The costs for a bag for an airline are way higher, though, so you can't expect sympathy.

Airlines have been handling luggage for a very long time, you would think they would have this figured out by now.

Anecdote: I flew Delta quite a bit some years ago and lived about 2 hours/90 miles away from the airport. They would routinely misplace my luggage (never lost it, thankfully) and they had to have somebody drive my bag to my house when they found it. This happened a dozen times. It must have cost them about the price of my ticket for each delivery.

I can only assume that it was because of the luggage missing connecting flights, but most of the time I had at least an hour layover. It just seems like they could make this work

Either that, or customers should wise up and overnight their luggage to their destination via FedEx. You know, I started writing that sentence aiming for "funny", but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. As the airlines charge more and more for checked bags, the differential cost to have your luggage reliably arrive, and in a probably-less-molested state, will eventually be well worth it.

With NWA, I had saved up enough miles for a round-trip ticket to anywhere I wanted (about a $1400 value) and was planning a summer getaway. When Delta purchased them, they converted my miles over to their program. That $1400 value from NWA instantly became $75.

It comes to no surprise that I will not fly Delta.

I miss NWA. They had the most helpful and friendly staff; simple attentiveness goes a long ways when you're about to be manhandled by TSA.

No system is perfect, and for systems like these, there is a business-optimal point where the cost of increasing the reliability further is higher than the cost of losing or misplacing some luggage.

That's the real reason behind regulations like the 200 âÂthey have to pay airline customers in the EU for delays of over 2 hours. It's not about giving the customer money, it's about giving the airlines an incentive to be on time.

And it works. I had two flights this year that were massively delayed, but

Yeah, and once it is in the TOS I wonder if using Twitter like this will become a criminal offense under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, "having knowingly accessed a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access" ?

Brilliant. That way BA wouldn't even have to pay for their own lawyers' time in a libel suit. Instead it would all be US prosecutors on the US taxpayer's dime.